Customer Reviews
The Last Third - By: Edward Barry, 22 Oct 2008 
This very original & dynamically written novel should be read for its final third.
Starting (and continuing) as a rather pedestrian travelogue, it eventually transcends to one of literature's truly vivid moments as a Western woman literally loses her identityin the desert & ... & this is the point...can't locate a context to rebuild or recover it.
These paragraphs plot some of the most emotionally involved writing I have ever encountered & certainly make it a novel worth staying with.
Loses the plot badly - By: daisyrock, 04 Oct 2008 
Four fifths of this book are excellent, if a little ponderous & slow-moving. The characters are well drawn & we feel gradually drawnin to a web of intrigue & decay. But just when I expected the narrative to pick up the pacein the final fifth of the novel, something strange happens. What was a vividly portrayed, believable tale, turns into an almost stream-of-consciousness babble of highly unlikely & dreamlike scenes. Of course, this is partly to convey the inner machinations of our leading lady's mind, but the result is almost as if we've leapt out of one novel into another, entirely different one. So, the build up we patiently payin for, never really pays off with any kind of satisfactory conclusion.
Splendid pictures of people and places - By: D. W. Miller, 29 Jun 2008 
The three main charactersin this story are nicely drawnin the first few pages & we stay with them throughout their journey across a part of Africa. The mood is a brooding one & relationships are never quite what they seem. The African scene is very accurately represented with much filth, darkness & brooding uncertainty that matches what is going on between the characters.
I came to feel that the self obsession bordering on self pity of the married partners made them morally bankrupt & very unsympathetic characters. By the end I had a very precise picture of what I wanted to happen to them. It did..
Shame on me for not finding Bowles' work before now but better late than never.
Character is Destiny - By: Ethan Cooper, 14 Jun 2008 Initially, Kit & Port, the preppy primary charactersin THE SHELTERING SKY, seem more like attitudes than people. The character Kit, for example, observes: "Other people rule my life." Earlyin his narration, Bowles adds: "The terror was already there inside her ready to take command."
Meanwhile, Port, despite his charms, is a sadly isolated person. Bowles says: "Although it was the basis of his unhappiness, this glacial deadness, he would cling to it always, because it was also the core of his being; he had built the being around it."
Earlyin TSS, these concept-driven characters have experiences of slightly bogus theatricality, with the insightful Bowles explaining the interaction between characters but not really bringing them to life. Kit & Port,in other words, have experiences that just don't ring true.
But then Bowles takes his characters & puts them on a bus on a heedless journey into the Sahara. And, their adventure, a truly riveting tale, is the perfect vehicle to explore the wacko personalities that Bowles has defined. "Book Two, The Earth's Sharp Edge," startsin Bou Noura, a desolate outpost where the European influence is negligible. Thereafter, everything that happens to Kit & Port is frighteningly real. And the writing becomes first-rate.
"The sun poured down on the bare earth; there was not a square inch of shadow, save at their feet. Her mind went back to the many times when, as a child, she had held a reading glass over some hapless insect, following it along the groundin its frenzied attempts to escape the increasingly accurate focusing of the lens, until finally she touched it with the blinding pinpoint of light, when as if by magic it ceased running, & she watched it slowly wither & begin to smoke. She felt that if she looked up she would find the sun grown to monstrous proportions.
My daughter told me this book was great & she was right! Highly recommended.
well-worth reading - By: vic, 15 Mar 2008 
I really enjoyed this book.It gripped me from the start but i am not really sure why?It is a page turner & at the end of each chapter i wanted to read on but i wanted more to happen.
